Chapter Two

By Lala Corriere

On gut instinct I immediately called Clueless Caroline back, which is unusual for me. Unless it was business related, even my best of friends knew that a delayed response to phone messages was my modus operandi.

Caroline’s words were simple. Flat. Laconic. “I need you to drive up here.”

     “What is it? What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“I’ll tell you when you get here,” she said.

I asked her to put my dad on the phone. She hung up.

Contrary to some notions, lawyers don’t work through Friday. It was Saturday, and I had a two-foot high stack of depositions to go over before my next case went to trial the following week.

     Caroline was asking me to drop everything and make the two hour drive from Scottsdale, Arizona, up to Oak Creek, a slice of mountain paradise near Sedona that was reminiscent of my childhood days in both the Blue Ridge Mountains and Colorado. Dad seemed to pack up and move with each new bride.

     I tossed the top half of my file folders into the back seat of my SUV. I assumed I’d be bored to a degree of mania within ten minutes and could at least peruse some of my paperwork while I was there.

     The drive is a pleasant one. I reasoned it couldn’t hurt to check on my dad and make the road trip as a gift of time, taking in the fresh air more than my dad’s blissful marriage. Still, knowing Caroline, and I really didn’t, I felt the anger pulsing in my temples. She probably needed help figuring out how to use email. Or how to use her convection oven. Damn. She might have broken one of her false fingernails and wondered why Elmer’s glue wasn’t working.

     Walking through the large cabin’s front door, always unlocked, the living room was blurred by the dense haze of cigarette smoke. Caroline was sitting in Dad’s leather recliner, snubbing out another butt in an already overflowing ashtray. The glass of bourbon next to it was nearly empty. The bottle next to the glass was nearly empty. She looked up at me, and with a slight flip of her hand, waved me inside.

     “Zel,” she mumbled.

Sheesh. Now the woman couldn’t even abbreviate my name to Zelda. Dumb. Or drunk.

     “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

     “I don’t know,” she replied. Were the tears from a weak woman? A scared woman? Fake and forced?

     “You don’t know where he is? He’s missing?”

     She nodded, her long blonde strands of hair falling down her ample cleavage.

     I tossed my briefcase down to the hardwood floor. “How long?”

     “Three nights”, she said, reaching for another cigarette.

     “What did the police say when you reported him missing?”

     “I didn’t call them.”

     “Caroline, we have to call them. Now.” I reached to my waist where my cradled cell phone stood constant guard.

     She shook her head. Not too much. The blonde tresses remained stuck between her breasts.

     “No,” she whispered. “Absolutely not.”